Journal Abstracts

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Awareness may be suppressed in more than 90% of childbirths today, as a basis for the overuse of other medical interventions in the labor and delivery process. Current childbirth education programs offered by the medical establishment support the prevalent use of risky procedures that may impair biological and psychological health. The quality of awareness in the pregnant woman and the womb child may be the most essential value pivotal to needed decisive change in childbirth medicine and education.

Today embryology and fetal research offers consistent findings that nature and nurture overlap. The relational and environmental world of the mother powerfully influences the development of her embryo and fetus. Early pre- and post-natal experiences, including early trauma, are encoded in the implicit memory of the fetus, located in the subcortical and deep limbic regions of the maturing brain. These memories will travel with us into our early days of infancy and beyond and more importantly, these early experiences set our ongoing physiological and psychological regulatory baselines.

Current literature demonstrates that stress during pregnancy can have long-term effects on offspring. The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible stress reactions of pregnant women exposed to terrorism. The main focus is on PTSD as the predominant reaction to terrorism and how it affects pregnancy. Conclusions: Although specific research linking terrorism and stress in pregnancy has not been studied/ published, the literature reviewed shows evidence that stress caused by terrorism is acute.

The relationship between negative events from conception to birth, and suicide, is explored. From extensive experiential work with clients, based on the work of the British psychiatrist Dr. Frank Lake, the author stresses that something else is going on in every death by suicide, that is not visible. Hidden factors relating to suicide have their roots in the pre- and perinatal period, from as far back as conception to the birth itself. Case studies are included and types of suicide correlated to various pre- and perinatal trauma are discussed.

The author's doctoral dissertation, Malattachment and the Self Struggle, offers an in-depth portrait of intergenerational attachment disruption, its relationship to depression and defensive personality disorders, and approaches to healing-all within the context of the fictional narrative of Pearl, for whom "mothering tears her open, then urges her to wholeness." This excerpt features an explanation of the effects and implications of an attuned attachment relationship between infant and caregiver, casting it as critical developmental nourishment and terming its corruption mala

In this paper, an extension of an earlier paper (Sonne, 2002b), the author advances the thesis that murderous sibling rivalry, one of the psychological and social consequences of the threat of being aborted, is a major dynamic operative in "ethnic cleansing," eugenic movements, racial, religious and international conflict, mass murders, serial killings, and sometimes even in marital and parenting behavior.

In the last 30 years there has been an increasing amount of psychological investigation into attachment. At the same time there appears in this literature to be a gap in the discussion of what may be the origins of early detachment of the child from his/her caretakers. This article suggests that the beginning lies in obstetrical care in today's highly interventional and technocratic management of pregnancy and childbirth. Specifically, what drives this situation is the attempt of obstetricians and medical professionals to avoid the highly litigious system.